Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 16th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Main Conference Theme Author(s) Gyorgy Hajnal Corvinus University of Budapest Budapest Hungary Title Policy problems in Hungary: In search of new failure mechanisms File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The apparently chronic inability of governments to pursue effective and efficient policies has been occupying much space on the research agendas of scholars in related disciplanry fields. Accordingly, the results are voluminous; failure factors identified range – to mention but a few – from inherent institutional inadequacies of liberal democratic political regimes and the resulting failures of political institutions to represent the interests of the general public through decision makers’ cognitive limitations to stumbling blocks of actual implementation. The basic drive underlying the research presented in the paper is a dissatisfaction regarding the explanatory, or even the descriptive power of this – howsoever broad – range of available models viewed from a specifically Hungarian (or, possibly, Central and Eastern European) perspective. This is not to say, of course, that policy failure mechanisms identified beforehand do not figure high; rather, it seems that important and recurring types of policy fiascos are simply not reflected by available explanations. The central ambition of the research is to make a step towards identifying, in the context of Hungarian public policy, relatively “new” failure mechanisms not, or only marginally, emphasized in contemporary scholarly work. The method of the research is qualitative case study, much resembling to the genre of grounded theorizing. Three cases of policy failures – selected on theoretical grounds – form the subject of the study: selected subfields of (i) building regulation, (ii) of harm reduction in drug policy, and (iii) of equal opportunity policy for the disabled. Computer aided qualitative data analysis was used to analyze the large amount of empirical evidence collected in the course of field research.
